Project Jigsaw: Context & History

The original goal of this Project, initiated in August 2008, was
to design and implement a module system focused narrowly upon the
goal of modularizing the JDK, and to apply that system to the JDK
itself. We expected the resulting module system to be useful to
developers for their own code, and it would have been fully
supported for that purpose, but it was not at the outset intended
to be an official part of the Java SE Platform
Specification.

For background on the initial proposal, please see the following
blog entries:

The growing demand for a truly standard module system for the
Java Platform motivated expanding the scope of the Project, as
described above, to produce a module system that can ultimately
become a JCP-approved part of the Java SE Platform and also
serve the needs of the ME and EE Platforms.

In an initial exploratory phase
we prototyped one particular approach to this set of
requirements.

Jigsaw was originally intended for Java 7 but was deferred to
Java 8 as part of "Plan B". More recently
a decision was made to defer it to Java 9 in order to allow
more time both for development and for broad review, testing, and
feedback: